Category: Social and economic aspects of nanotechnology

How fast can electric cars take over from fossil fuelled vehicles? This partly depends on how quickly the world’s capacity for manufacturing batteries – especially the lithium-ion batteries that are currently the favoured technology for all-electric vehicles – can expand. The current world capacity for manufacturing the kind of batteries that power electric cars is 34 GWh, and, as has been widely publicised, Elon Musk plans to double this number, with Tesla’s giant battery factory currently under construction in Nevada. This joint venture with Japan’s Panasonic will bring another 35 GWh capacity on stream in the next few years. But, as a fascinating recent article in the FT makes clear (Electric cars: China’s battle for the battery market), Tesla isn’t the only player in this game. On the FT’s figures, by 2020, it’s expected that there will be a total of 174 GWh battery manufacturing capacity in the world – an increase of more than 500%. Of this, no less than 109 GWh will be in China.

What effect will this massive increase have on the markets? The demand for batteries – largely from electric vehicles – was for 11 GWh in 2015. Market penetration of electric vehicles is increasing, but it seems unlikely that demand will keep up with this huge increase in supply (one estimate projects demand in 2020 at 54 GWh). It seems inevitable that prices will fall in response to this coming glut – and batteries will end up being sold at less than the economically sustainable cost. The situation is reminiscent of what happened with silicon solar cells a few years ago – the same massive increase in manufacturing capacity, driven by China, resulting in big price falls – and the bankruptcy of many manufacturers.

This recent report (PDF) from the US’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory helpfully breaks down some of the input costs of manufacturing batteries. Costs are lower in China than the USA, but labour costs form a relatively small part of this. The two dominating costs, by far, are the materials and the cost of capital. China has the advantage in materials costs by being closer to the centre of the materials supply chains, which are based largely in Korea, Japan and China – this is where a substantial amount of the value is generated.

If the market price falls below the minimum sustainable price – as I think it must – most of the slack will be taken up by the cost of capital. Effectively, some of the huge capital costs going into these new plants will, one way or another, be written off – Tesla’s shareholders will lose even more money, and China’s opaque financial system will end up absorbing the losses. There will undoubtedly be manufacturing efficiencies to be found, and technical improvements in the materials, often arising from precise control of their nanostructure, will lead to improvements in the cost-effectiveness of the batteries. This will, in turn, accelerate the uptake of electric vehicles – possibly encouraged by strong policy steers in China especially.

Even at relatively low relative penetration of electric vehicles relative to the internal combustion energy, in plausible scenarios (see for example this analysis from Imperial College’s Grantham Centre) they may displace enough oil to have a material impact on total demand, and thus keep a lid on oil prices, perhaps even leading to a peak in oil demand as early as 2020. This will upend many of the assumptions currently being made by the oil companies.

But the dramatic fall in the cost of lithium-ion batteries that this manufacturing overcapacity will have other effects on the direction of technology development. It will create a strong force locking-in the technology of lithium-ion batteries – other types of battery will struggle to establish themselves in competition with this incumbent technology (as we have seen with alternatives to silicon photovoltaics), and technological improvements are most likely to be found in the kinds of material tweaks that can easily fit into the massive materials supply chains that are developing.

To be parochial, the UK government has just trailed funding for a national research centre for battery technology. Given the UK’s relatively small presence in this area, and its distance from the key supply chains for materials for batteries, it is going to need to be very careful to identify those places where the UK is going to be in a position to extract value. Mass manufacture of lithium ion batteries is probably not going to be one of those places.

Finally, why hasn’t John Goodenough (who has perhaps made the biggest contribution to the science of lithium-ion batteries in their current form) won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry yet?

To quote my interviewer, Nikola Danaylov, “During our 75 min discussion with Prof. Richard Jones we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: his general work in nanotechnology, his book and blog on the topic; whether technological progress is accelerating or not; transhumanism, Ray Kurzweil and technological determinism; physics, Platonism and Frank J. Tipler‘s claim that “the singularity is inevitable”; the strange ideological routes of transhumanism; Eric Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology as reducing the material world to software; the over-representation of physicists on both sides of the transhumanism and AI debate; mind uploading and the importance of molecules as the most fundamental units of biological processing; Aubrey de Grey‘s quest for indefinite life extension; the importance of ethics and politics…”

I’m grateful to many people for recommendations on blogs and twitter, and I should give special thanks to Dale Carrico, whose original suggestion it was to put the e-book together, and on whose own arguments chapter 5 in particular draws heavily. A review from transhumanist Giulio Prisco finds a surprising amount to agree with, and some interesting comments below the line.

There was a generous review from the economist Diane Coyle: The future is multiple, not singular; she describes the book as “a brief, compelling demolition of the idea that digital technology is hurtling us towards a ‘singularity’”.

The e-book was the subject of an interview with Russ Roberts on EconTalk, which over the course of more than an an hour covered transhumanism, brain uploading, the concept of emergence in physics, economics and biology, and the economics of technology and innovation more generally. There my insistence on the importance of government intervention for radical innovation collided with my interviewer’s position favouring small government and free markets.

Finally, the online magazine Demos Quarterly published a dialogue between me and Zoltan Istvan, the American writer, futurist, philosopher and transhumanist who is running for US President under the transhumanist banner in the 2016 election. Here’s an extract from my opening statement:

“Technological progress isn’t inevitable, nor is the direction it takes pre-ordained. Transhumanism as a movement appropriates the achievements that technology has made already, and uses these to give credibility to a series of future aspirations that aren’t so much extrapolations of current trends, but the fulfillments of ancient human desires. People have longed for a transcendent world of material plenty and everlasting life for millennia, and these wishes don’t become any more likely to be fulfilled by being dressed up in a new language of science.”

The UK was the country in which mass production of steel began, so the current difficulties of the UK’s steel industry are highly politically charged. For many, it is unthinkable that a country with pretensions to be an economic power could lose its capacity to mass produce steel. To others, though, the steel industry is the epitome of the old heavy industry that has been superseded by the new, weightless economy of services, now supercharged by new digital technologies; we should not mourn its inevitable passing. So, is steel irrelevant, in our new, dematerialised economy? Here are two graphs which, on the face of it, seem to tell contradictory stories about the importance, or otherwise, of steel in modern economies.

The “steel intensity” of the economy of the USA – the amount of steel required to produce unit real GDP output (expressed as 1000’s of 2009 US dollars).

Transhumanism: technically wrong, ideologically suspect, and damaging to the way we talk about technology…

As an experiment, I’ve brought together a number of the pieces I’ve written here and elsewhere about molecular nanotechnology, mind-uploading, and the origins and wider implications of transhumanism, to make, after some light editing, a 54-page e-book with the title “Against Transhumanism: the delusion of technological transcendence”.

The iPhone must be one of the most instantly recognisable symbols of the modern “tech economy”. So, it was an astute choice by Mariana Mazzacuto to put it at the centre of her argument about the importance of governments in driving the development of technology. Mazzacuto’s book – The Entrepreneurial State – argues that technologies like the iPhone depended on the ability and willingness of governments to take on technological risks that the private sector is not prepared to assume. She notes also that it is that same private sector which captures the rewards of the government’s risk taking. The argument is a powerful corrective to the libertarian tendencies and the glorification of the free market that is particularly associated with Silicon Valley.

Her argument could, though, be caricatured as saying that the government built the iPhone. But to put it this way would be taking the argument much too far – the contributions, not just of Apple, but of many other companies in a worldwide supply chain that have developed the technologies that the iPhone integrates, are enormous. The iPhone was made possible by the power of private sector R&D, the majority of it not in fact done by Apple, but by many companies around the world, companies that most people have probably not even heard of.

And yet, this private sector R&D was indeed encouraged, driven, and indeed sometimes funded outright, by government (in fact, more than one government – although the USA has had a major role, other governments have played their parts too in creating Apple’s global supply chain). It drew on many results from publicly funded research, in Universities and public research institutes around the world.

So, while it isn’t true to say the government built the iPhone, what is true is to say that the iPhone would not have happened without governments. We need to understand better the ways government and the private sector interact to drive innovation forward, not just to get a truer picture of where the iPhone came from, but in order to make sure we continue to get the technological innovations we want and need.

Integrating technologies is important, but innovation in manufacturing matters too

The iPhone (and the modern smartphone more generally) is, truly, an awe-inspiring integration of many different technologies. It’s a powerful computer, with an elegant and easy to use interface, it’s a mobile phone which connects to the sophisticated, computer driven infrastructure that constitutes the worldwide cellular telephone system, and through that wireless data infrastructure it provides an interface to powerful computers and databases worldwide. Many of the new applications of smartphones (as enablers, for example, of the so-called “sharing economy”) depend on the package of powerful sensors they carry – to infer its location (the GPS unit), to determine what is happening to it physically (the accelerometers), and to record images of its surroundings (the camera sensor).

Mazzacuto’s book traces back the origins of some of the technologies behind the iPod, like the hard drive and the touch screen, to government funded work. This is all helpful and salutary to remember, though I think there are two points that are underplayed in this argument.

Firstly, I do think that the role of Apple itself (and its competitors), in integrating many technologies into a coherent design supported by usable software, shouldn’t be underestimated – though it’s clear that Apple in particular has been enormously successful in finding the position that extracts maximum value from physical technologies that have been developed by others.

Secondly, when it comes to those physical technologies, one mustn’t underestimate the effort that needs to go in to turn an initial discovery into a manufacturable product. A physical technology – like a device to store or display information – is not truly a technology until it can be manufactured. To take an initial concept from an academic discovery or a foundational patent to the point at which one has a a working, scalable manufacturing process involves a huge amount of further innovation. This process is expensive and risky, and the private sector has often proved unwilling to bear these costs and risks without support from the state, in one form or another. The history of some of the many technologies that are integrated in devices like the iPhone illustrate the complexities of developing technologies to the point of mass manufacture, and show how the roles of governments and the private sector have been closely intertwined.

For example, the ultraminiaturised hard disk drive that made the original iPod possible (now largely superseded by cheaper, bigger, flash memory chips) did indeed, as pointed out by Mazzucato, depend on the Nobel prize-winning discovery by Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg of the phenomenon of giant magnetoresistance. This is a fascinating and elegant piece of physics, which suggested a new way of detecting magnetic fields with great sensitivity. But to take this piece of physics and devise a way of using it in practise to create smaller, higher capacity hard disk drives, as Stuart Parkin’s group at IBM’s Almaden Laboratory did, was arguably just as significant a contribution.

Transhumanists look forward to a technological singularity, which we should expect to take place on or around 2045, if Ray Kurzweil is to be relied on. The technological singularity is described as something akin to an event horizon, a date at which technological growth becomes so rapid that to look beyond it becomes quite unknowable to us mere cis-humans. In some versions this is correlated with the time when, due to the inexorable advance of Moore’s Law, machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence and goes into a recursive cycle of self-improvement.

The original idea of the technological singularity is usually credited to the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, though earlier antecedents can be found, for example in the writing of the British Marxist scientist J.D. Bernal. Even amongst transhumanists and singularitarianists there are different views about what might be meant by the singularity, but I don’t want to explore those here. Instead, I note this – when we talk of the technological singularity we’re using a metaphor, a metaphor borrowed from mathematics and physics. It’s the Singularity as a metaphor that I want to probe in this post.

Last night I gave a lecture at UCL to launch their new centre for Responsible Research and Innovation. My title was “Can innovation ever be responsible? Is it ever irresponsible not to innovate?”, and in it I attempted to put the current vogue within science policy for the idea of Responsible Research and Innovation within a broader context. If I get a moment I’ll write up the lecture as a (long) blogpost but in the meantime, here is a PDF of my slides.

The recent movie “Transcendence” will not be troubling the sci-fi canon of classics, if the reviews are anything to go by. But its central plot device – “uploading” a human consciousness to a computer – remains both a central aspiration of transhumanists, and a source of queasy fascination to the rest of us. The idea is that someone’s mind is simply a computer programme, that in the future could be run on a much more powerful computer than a brain, just as one might run an old arcade game on a modern PC in emulation mode. “Mind uploading” has a clear appeal for people who wish to escape the constraints of our flesh and blood existence, notably the constraint of our inevitable mortality.

In this post I want to consider two questions about mind uploading, from my perspective as a scientist. I’m going to use as an operational definition of “uploading a mind” the requirement that we can carry out a computer simulation of the activity of the brain in question that is indistinguishable in its outputs from the brain itself. For this, we would need to be able to determine the state of an individual’s brain to sufficient accuracy that it would be possible to run a simulation that accurately predicted the future behaviour of that individual and would convince an external observer that it faithfully captured the individual’s identity. I’m entirely aware that this operational definition already glosses over some deep conceptual questions, but it’s a good concrete starting point. My first question is whether it will be possible to upload the mind of anyone reading this now. My answer to this is no, with a high degree of probability, given what we know now about how the brain works, what we can do now technologically, and what technological advances are likely in our lifetimes. My second question is whether it will ever be possible to upload a mind, or whether there is some point of principle that will always make this impossible. I’m obviously much less certain about this, but I remain sceptical.

This will be a long post, going into some technical detail. To summarise my argument, I start by asking whether or when it will be possible to map out the “wiring diagram” of an individual’s brain – the map of all the connections between its 100 billion or so neurons. We’ll probably be able to achieve this mapping in the coming decades, but only for a dead and sectioned brain; the challenges for mapping out a living brain at sub-micron scales look very hard. Then we’ll ask some fundamental questions about what it means to simulate a brain. Simulating brains at the levels of neurons and synapses requires the input of phenomenological equations, whose parameters vary across the components of the brain and change with time, and are inaccessible to in-vivo experiment. Unlike artificial computers, there is no clean digital abstraction layer in the brain; given the biological history of nervous systems as evolved, rather than designed, systems, there’s no reason to expect one. The fundamental unit of biological information processing is the molecule, rather than any higher level structure like a neuron or a synapse; molecular level information processing evolved very early in the history of life. Living organisms sense their environment, they react to what they are sensing by changing the way they behave, and if they are able to, by changing the environment too. This kind of information processing, unsurprisingly, remains central to all organisms, humans included, and this means that a true simulation of the brain would need to be carried out at the molecular scale, rather than the cellular scale. The scale of the necessary simulation is out of reach of any currently foreseeable advance in computing power. Finally I will conclude with some much more speculative thoughts about the central role of randomness in biological information processing. I’ll ask where this randomness comes from, finding an ultimate origin in quantum mechanical fluctuations, and speculate about what in-principle implications that might have on the simulation of consciousness.

Why would people think mind uploading will be possible in our lifetimes, given the scientific implausibility of this suggestion? I ascribe this to a combination of over-literal interpretation of some prevalent metaphors about the brain, over-optimistic projections of the speed of technological advance, a lack of clear thinking about the difference between evolved and designed systems, and above all wishful thinking arising from people’s obvious aversion to death and oblivion.

On science and metaphors

I need to make a couple of preliminary comments to begin with. First, while I’m sure there’s a great deal more biology to learn about how the brain works, I don’t see yet that there’s any cause to suppose we need fundamentally new physics to understand it. Continue reading “Your mind will not be uploaded”

Transhumanists are surely futurists, if they are nothing else. Excited by the latest developments in nanotechnology, robotics and computer science, they fearlessly look ahead, projecting consequences from technology that are more transformative, more far-reaching, than the pedestrian imaginations of the mainstream. And yet, their ideas, their motivations, do not come from nowhere. They have deep roots, perhaps surprising roots, and following those intellectual trails can give us some important insights into the nature of transhumanism now. From antecedents in the views of the early 20th century British scientific left-wing, and in the early Russian ideologues of space exploration, we’re led back, not to rationalism, but to a particular strand of religious apocalyptic thinking that’s been a persistent feature of Western thought since the middle ages.

Transhumanism is an ideology, a movement, or a belief system, which predicts and looks forward to a future in which an increasing integration of technology with human beings leads to a qualititative, and positive, change in human nature. Continue reading “Transhumanism has never been modern”

Longer reads: on nanotechnology

Soft Machines: nanotechnology and life, a book about nanotechnology. For more details about the book, see here.

Sheffield Scanner Appeal

On June 30th I attempted to walk 50 miles in less than 24 hours, together with with many other university staff, to raise money for a combined MRI/PET scanner to support medical research - especially into neurodegenerative diseases like motor neurone disease and Alzheimer's - at the University of Sheffield and Sheffield's hospitals.
I made it! It took me about 17 hours. You can still support this great cause via my JustGiving page.